With some design changes and new social features

Aug 25, 2009 14:13 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo is launching a full-scale attack with big updates to some of its core businesses. Yahoo Messenger saw the release of the latest major version, in beta, and Yahoo Mail gets an overhaul as well with some design changes and, of course, some social features. The most recent changes are the culmination of a longer list of features that has been gradually introduced and Yahoo plans to make all of them available for all of its users in the coming months.

“Over the past nine months, we’ve made some significant updates to Yahoo! Mail, making it more productive, more social and helping people stay better connected to those who matter most – but we only provided access to these new capabilities to a small group of you as we ramped up the features,” John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, wrote. “Today, I’m excited to say we are bringing new and dynamic social functionality, third-party apps, enhanced photo sharing plus many more new features to all of your inboxes worldwide…yep, all 300 million of you!”

The first set of changes, though not so obvious, are the design tweaks that Yahoo hopes should streamline the experience for its users. The Calendar and Notes native apps have been moved to the new Applications area, which will house both third-party apps as well as those developed by the company.

The list of applications available for Yahoo Mail is already varied enough, with third-party apps like Edit Photos by Picnik, PayPal, My Photos by Xoopit and Big Sender by Zumo Drive, and it's about to get even bigger with new ones coming soon, including an event planning app. In line with previous statements coming from the CEO Carol Bartz herself, the new interface also features less ads, with the left hand side ones being removed to make more room for the actual features.

Another big feature is the new drag and drop attachment box, which enables users to manage attachments much easier, allowing them to add multiple files at once or even whole folders. The attachment limit was also increased from 10MB to 25MB, which makes Yahoo Mail a much more enticing option for sharing files.

Finally, the “What's New” page is getting a handful of new social features that could prove very useful. Emails coming from the users' contacts are now getting special treatment and will show up in a section on the What's New page with every other email filtered making it much easier to keep up with what your friends are doing. The page also features the new Yahoo Updates, which is making its way into every Yahoo service from Messenger to the homepage.